Apples and oranges

It’s pretty unpleasant watching children being so aggressively targeted, especially when under the façade of boosting children’s “academic achievement and character development” through the medium of yo-yos. “Always say No No to an overpriced Yo-yo!” would have been a more apt message.

The presenter stopped just short of saying “Do you want to be the only kid in the playground without a yoyo? Even if you can’t afford it, even if you’re parents refuse to give you the money, are you just going to give up like a loser would? Or are you going to whine and whine until they give in?”  She even halted me from filming the event. I do have some footage though, so if you hanker for a brief clip of a woman playing with her yo-yo, you know who to contact.

I’d arrived that morning armed with a screwdriver, gaffer tape and batteries. I wasn’t planning on an interrogation; it was to fix a bunch of floor turtles. Somehow I’d managed to get involved in one of the many clubs sprouting up around school.

Other clubs include a chess club in which several of the children make up the rules as they go along and a magic club that aptly disappeared after one session. Stories abound that several children were placed in a cupboard only to reappear in Addis Abbaba. The magician placated the parents by offering them two free tickets to his next show.

It was a usual week all in all, the space cadet declared to the class “if I look at the sun for too long it makes me sneeze”, a copy of the Lord of the Rings turned up in the gents toilets, so at least one of the staff is highly constipated and I had a phonics observation that if I could sum it in a sound it would be “hhhhmmmmnnnnnnuuuunnnnggggg”…then he arrived.

Mr Bonapart was an instant hit with the women, with his closely cropped hair (bald), wide smile (veneers) and diamond stud earring (premature midlife crisis). It began with the staff talking about him in hushed reverential tones like he was the second coming, within a week everyone everywhere were falling over themselves to gush about how wonderful he was.

He came in at the weekend to organise a display, drove one of the staff when her car broke down and formed a human bridge to allow children to escape from a capsized boat. Ok I made the last one up but for all I know it’s true.

Now I’m not the envious type, these are just observations of his irritating perfection and just as I was imagining ways of him being beheaded by my classroom guillotine, he wandered in asking to borrow a lead for his camera.

I may not light up a room every time I enter it. I may not be charming, smug and effusive. I may not have that gift of making you feel that you are the only person in the room when I talk to you (incidentally on this occasion I was, so it didn’t count). I may not even be able to converse easily with women about any subject they wish to share with me…but at least I know where the lead to my camera is! (It’s in the store cupboard, on top of the still knackered floor turtles and next to the Sneeze-safe toolkit).

He returned it really promptly. This is war.

Going home

In a period of uncertainty for so many people it’s only right I join the queue. I discovered the ‘job’ I have may in fact be only temporary. The previous class teacher turned up, with recently born babe in arms, to wander around and stake a claim to my/her classroom.

The odd thing was that the conversation was filtered through her baby, in a display that even the most liberal of people might describe as ‘passive aggressive’. “This is going to be mummy’s classroom again soon” she cooed repeatedly.

It’s always after the fact that you think of the funnies. I should have adopted the same tone and said to the baby “mummy’s a silly mummy; this is my classroom nowie wowie”. Maybe all future negotiations will have to be done through her bairn?

I wanted to speak to the Deputy Head teacher but rather burned my bridges with her unintentionally. She’d wafted into the staff room and said to me “Alright babes?” “A little over familiar” I thought, but what the heck. “Yeah good thanks” I replied. She shot me a filthy look and I realised she was on the phone. In retrospect it could have been worse; at least I stopped short of calling her “schnookie lumps”.

At least my kids fought my corner for me. During assembly the Head Teacher asked children to come forward and tell the school what their targets were for this term. “Targets?” I thought “what targets?” It was too late; the space cadet of my class had already shot up his arm. “I’m fucked” was my first thought. This could go either one of two ways and I leant more heavily on the side of him answering with something like “Thursday?”

Despite the fact I’m yet to teach my class the art of ‘blagging it’, he turned in a master class performance and even quoted me as being the “best teacher in the world”. I could have hugged him, but he has developed a deep mistrust of me since I explained to him what an ulcer was. Well, you try explaining how ulcers are formed to an 8-year-old without sending them into an abyss of fear.

We’re attempting to rehearse two assemblies simultaneously (a year group and class assembly). Our class assembly needs to get past the censors. It’s based on the relationship between water and faith and despite the aquatic theme it’s a perilously dry subject. I livened up the story of Noah’s Ark with Noah turning away one of the three little pigs, only for it to get the red pen treatment.

The class have gone wayward of late which I put down to post-holiday blues. The amount of change to the timetable leaves the days uncomfortably close to resembling the last week of the Christmas term. Their behaviour mirrors this.

So what better way to assert my authority, I hear you say, than to nearly blind a child? On this occasion it was unintentional (that’s a joke Mumsnet). Before lunch the kids receive a squirt from a pump actioned antiseptic hand soap tediously delivered by yours truly. On this occasion it somehow misfired and hit a poor child in the eye.

Thankfully he was ok, but it was the same child who I’d earlier told would be using a sand timer for his work. It was to encourage him to start his work within a minute, before the sand disappeared. As soon as the timer had been turned over though he’d suddenly gone into an apoplectic flurry of frantic activity. He was furiously scrawling lines across the page as if his life depended on it.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Can’t talk! only got a minute!” he blurted out. He’d mistakenly thought I’d given him a minute to do everything. I could have blinded and given him a hernia in the space of a day. Explain that to the parents.

So this is Christmas

As one teacher kicked me up the arse so another landed a custard pie in my face. Normally I’d have grounds for harassment but this was Pantomime where anything goes. I played my ‘Felf’ character to perfection, although there was nearly a last-minute change of character. As I helped the ‘Prince’ put the backdrop up, I stepped off the bench we were both standing on. As it tipped up he took the theatrical idiom ‘break a leg’ literally and nearly fell of the stage.

The slapstick continued even after the performance. I didn’t see the run up although I felt the moment when shoe met groin. Just as red rag is to a bull so my red felf trousers must have appeared to this particular child. Why he felt the need to kick me square in the nuts when I was clearly one of the Pantomime ‘good guys’ is anyones guess. It made my eyes water and my bell tinkle.

The last day of term was proving to be a testing day. I’d run into a dog on the way to the tube station and I had to change into my felf outfit in a small cramped toilet cubicle. I was within earshot of passing kids and every slight movement set off a sound effect from my ‘Sparkle and Glitter’ wand. I prayed it would go unnoticed.

The children responded with much enthusiasm to my turn. It was nice that so many of them spontaneously hugged me just as the Head Teacher arrived. One child did unfortunately produce a torrent of vomit but I like to think that was more of a reflection on the amount of party food he’d consumed.

Of course I had to play teacher too. I reprimanded some children who had crossed out the names out of children in their Christmas cards and replaced them with mine. I also had to tell them not to ask one of our teachers anymore when her baby was due. As I said, it was a difficult day.

The afternoon was a heady mix of cake, non-fizzy drinks and party games. To double our delight a consignment of whiteboard pens arrived. It was like the last days of Rome, primary-school style.

And suddenly there was none. As the last child trailed off with their parent I was left alone to contemplate the end of my first teaching term. My head swam, my nerves were shattered and my balls ached. Then a wonderful thing happened…it started to snow. Merry Christmas!

Take shelter

The Pantomime continues apace, although my role is ever-changing. I was originally the narrator, then ‘fairy number 3′ and now in my latest incarnation I will be an elf with fairy wings. Or an elf that’s in touch with his feminine side, a cross between a fairy and an elf. A ‘felf’ if you will.

I just need to organise an outfit, although the children kindly offered to make me one. This was a sweet and good-natured suggestion but should the paper effort fall apart live on stage I could be arrested.

I am approaching the end of my first term and can feel my stamina wilting. I am getting the kids names wrong and confusing lunch and playtime. I would be less aware of this if the children did not go nuts for every slip up I make. It magnifies the slightest of mistakes, including my accidental pasting of work into one child’s book, so it appeared she had gone from knowing little English to confidently using alliteration, metaphor and similes in the course of a week.

The class and I have an understanding though, which has only come about through my doing everything possible to keep up the previous class teacher’s standards. I have created a Gestapo-like set of informants whose job it is to be ‘my ears’ and listen out for whispering in the corridors. Some take it more seriously than other. I even have one child whose purpose it is to trail the three most unreliable children and be the ‘ears for the Three Musketeers’.

I’m sure the Three Musketeers must have some shared laughs at my attempt to lead them through the playground. I raise the register aloft to let children in other year groups know we are passing through. This has made me target practice for every ball they can hurriedly lay their hands on. It’s tightened up my reflexes though.

We’ve been bonded as a class through ‘the Great Whiteboard pen shortage’ of 2011. A long wait for whiteboard pens has meant my children have gone from one each, to now one between four. Just as our collective spirit has risen so have the number of oddities I hear. One child revealed “my father tells me never to drink the anti-venom in the house!” (we live in North London). Looking for ideas for a class prayer, two girls suggested a song about being “small town girls waiting for a boy on the midnight train”. What are they teaching them in Church these days?

I set homework this week for the class to practice spinning clockwise and anti-clockwise. This, and the song, could be all the evidence those girl’s parents need to send them for a joint exorcism.

Just as you should never go food shopping when you’re hungry, you shouldn’t read your classes letters to Santa when you’re feeling tired and emotional.  The letters ranged from the unusual (asking for Ouija boards, goats), the less than charitable (one girl asked  for her brother to confuse opening the window, with the door, of a moving car) and the downright heartbreaking, children asking for a home, to stop being bullied or a hot water bottle to keep warm.

One girl asked for a toy, any toy and for her dad to get a job. She left a tick box at the end asking Father Christmas if he liked her. Father Christmas, of course, ticked it ‘yes’.

The squeeze

‘The underpants are on the cow goes bong’ wrote one child. It was right though as we were learning nonsense verse. This was a child who often wrote guff so it was something he excelled in. It’s odd that when the same child was given a challenge to make up a sum for me to answer, he produced a problem that made splitting the atom seem like splitting peas.

My first strike day approaches and yet only half the staff are striking. This is surprising considering we are all NUT members. Even more demoralising was the head teacher reading out the names of us ‘blacklegs’. Originally I was going to do a peaceful John Lennon-esque protest from my bed but I feel sufficiently annoyed now to hit the streets.

My blacklegs will eventually be squeezing into a pair of tights for the staff pantomime to play ‘ballet dancer number 3′. This also came as a surprise as I’d asked to be the narrator. Are malevolent forces at work? Little do they know I actually studied ballet and graduated with a 2:2 (tutu geddit?).

Anyway, as ballet dancer number 3 I intend to give my character depth, so he is in fact an undercover cover with 24 hours to track down a serial killer (before having to hand in his gun and badge to the DA). A challenge considering I have a blink and you’ll miss it part.

This week I had the task of teaching my 7 year olds about drugs. As I’d missed a previous lesson I had to combine this with the dangers of alcohol. I asked a teaching assistant to take photos of the lesson. It was clear from reviewing the photos some digital manipulation would be necessary to create the illusion that all the class were facing the right way. This was evidence, if it was ever needed, that mixing drugs with alcohol doesn’t work.

A tearful teacher told me about a child in her class who was was leaving. This poor child has a back-story that even the most ardent of soap opera fans would consider dubious. I was among the teachers he had asked to have a goodbye photo with. My contribution to his happiness was the merest blip on the radar.

He had come up to me in the playground, complaining he was bored and had no friends. Sloping around us at the time was a boy from his class. “He can be your friend?” I suggested. “But we haven’t got a game to play!” he whined. “Child A” I said, pointing to one of them “get Child B!” They both ran off. Simple, but effective.

His teacher, an NQT like myself, showed me some forms which contained targets for her children such as “to use the toilet independently and not soil himself on the carpet”. It made my glue-glitter-vomit incident seem as incidental as the head teacher’s remark to me that I “apparently work here”. Maybe she is on to the fact that I’ve only pretended to have a religious epiphany so I can get some brief shut-eye when we bow our heads for prayer in assembly.

Her remark out of context seems harsh; it was more a comment on the fact that I am often a voice drowned out in the staff room. I’ve always preferred to be someone who listens and observes, otherwise you might miss nuggets of chatter like this one:

Teacher 1: I am getting sick of Herbert ignoring me!

Teacher 2: Herbert? The deaf one?

Teacher 1: oh is he deaf?

Something changed

As the old saying goes there is only one thing worse than glitter on glue on carpet and that’s vomit on glitter on glue on carpet. I had to deal with all four simultaneously after a hectic art lesson. As I scrubbed away on my knees my abiding thought was “for this I went to college?”

With the Christmas season approaching all teachers are aware of the ticking glitter, glue and puke time bomb. It was also anti-bullying week and one child embraced both events by providing an anti-bullying poster showing Father Christmas being beat up.

After our recent bird show, I gave out photos of the children at the show without realising I needed to ask for payment first. It was a simple enough mistake to make but now I’m paranoid the bird show people might be looking for revenge. I suspect that even as we speak they’re training up a flock of suicide bomber carrier pigeons to attack me when I least suspect it.

The same child who provided the picture of Father Christmas being battered, did at least bring in payment for the photo. The payment was later returned to me by the office though as the bank-note was forged. I now faced having to confront a parent over the use of counterfeit money.

As it turned out it was the child’s idea of a “joke”. Nonetheless I had to deliver a rocket to him about how this was as a criminal offence (the banknote was pathetically forged; even the Queen looked like she’d had a stroke). I managed to undermine my rant slightly by then turning and walking into a door, but I hope the point was made.

The children do amuse (one child described Mother Theresa as having a ‘fat arm’?), bemuse (another told me he was born with a donkey tail), impress (one child clapped an almost hernia inducing 123 times in a minute, as part of a maths challenge) and confuse (the autistic child said “I’m glad I’m not a vegetarian because I couldn’t go to church” – “body of Christ?” I guessed but no, it was the leather praying mats).

Remembrance Day will be remembered by me for desperately trying to halt a game of hide and seek for a two-minute silence and I also managed to misspell misspelled 30 times when correcting a spelling test. Despite all this I realise daily how lucky I am to have such a nice class. I’m even trying to ingratiate myself more with the staff by taking the role as narrator in the school Pantomime. Oh no you’re not!

Remember to remember

Using multiples of different coloured powders, painstakingly glued into place, this was an enchanting piece of sacred Rangoli art…at least it was until I accidentally kicked it over. I never did find out how long it took the children to create the work for the school’s Diwhali competition but I felt sick. All that remained were the powders on my size 9 shoe. Ironically I could have entered the shoe into the competition and won.

To say sorry I covered the walls of my classroom with their hastily redone Rangoli artwork. I didn’t realise that the swastika features so heavily in Hindu art. Anyone glancing into my classroom would think I was attempting a Third Wave experiment.

I managed to avoid any further wrath from any Hindu God and my class, yet I still met enough problems to keep me on my not-very-twinkle toes. One child urinated on the carpet (an accident? a dirty protest?), another admitted to cheating and this after I’d tried to laud him as a genius to his parents. Thankfully for him and me, his parents didn’t speak any English.

If parents evening taught me one thing it’s that I have the ‘gift of the gab’. Despite the term being only six weeks old,  I spent five and a half hours with the parents gassing about levels and plans for each term, when all they probably wanted to know is “is she doing ok?” or “has he stopped pissing on the carpet?” A sentence in one child’s book read ‘mum hits everyone because she is rude’. Thankfully, only Dad showed up.

So half-term cameth (is that a word? it is now) and it’s been about trying to deal with and learn from these myriad of moments. I’m a rookie pretending to the class that I’m not and it’s energy zapping. But as one friend wisely said to me, you can only ever be ‘perfectly imperfect’.

---

These are some of the genuine search terms people have used, only to inexplicably end up at my blog (along with some sardonic comments in red).

i just projectile vomited and do bridge walks and he wonders why he’s single.

part time tamil teaching jobs in Colombo you’ve come to the right place!

frivolous home made robotic glockenspiel for sale, one carefree owner.

the answer to brain teaser is pinky and perky fish really? I thought the answer was ‘the Belgians’.

“need the toilet” + “too late” I think we’ve met.

are you an alien tim see the next exciting instalment when all will be revealed!

Grounded

A week before the end of term and I cut a strange shape. I’ve been buying rewards for the children who’ve reached the top of the reward ladder and tissues to ward off the kids germs. Struggling out of Poundland with my goods, I resemble a crap toy enthusiast with too much time on his hands. I head home to work on my IEP’s, APP, ECM, AFL, CPD when I long to spend my weekends doing sweet FA.

We spent a wet Tuesday morning burying a fake dinosaur bone on the school grounds. It was for a writing exercise and despite our best efforts the most perceptive spotted the words ‘Made in China’ written on it. Thankfully most of the class bought enthusiastically into the scam.

To encourage the class, the teacher joins in with the writing exercise. 15 minutes in and my wrist began to ache. “Is your hand hurting?” asked one of the children. “Yes it’s from all the digging this morning…” I said before realising my mistake. 30 pairs of eyes looked up, registered their feelings of deceit and returned solemnly to their work.

They still managed to produce some consistently good stuff, with the exception of one child. His story went off into the weirdest of tangents, including a visit to the peehole (which I assumed was slang for toilet, till I realised he meant PE Hall). This was the same child who has started putting the superlative ‘Super’ before his name on written work. Undermining this are two reasons 1) super is spelt incorrectly 2) he was once absent from school for “choking on part of a trampoline”. For his ‘wish’ I was going to suggest not dropping acid before writing.

My first observation almost didn’t happen. I placed a chair for my observer by the carpet and then forgot to warn the children it was there. Two of the most enthusiastic of children decided to speed walk into class and one went flying. My observer was on her way and I had a child writing around on the carpet, with a black eye and making a noise reminiscent of a startled giraffe.

Never before have I been so grateful for a teaching assistant’s help. By the time the observer arrived it was almost as if nothing had occurred. The only clues were the slight tremors in my hands and a suddenly very quiet class who were wondering which one of them I was going to inadvertently harm next.

The children’s revenge arrived during assembly. We were watching the Year 6 children perform a show based on Victorian waifs and strays. One of my class was holding and rubbing a piece of material, long enough for me to decide to take it off him. What I didn’t realise was that he had managed to accumulate just enough static electricity so that when I grabbed it my hand snapped backwards. Kids are perceptive to stuff like this and I garnered even bigger laughs than the name Dr Barnado was getting. I did at least use the incident for a science lesson.

The next best excuse for absence from school, followed a vist from a bird show.  It arrived a clear two days after we each had our photograph taken with one of the birds.

The excuse didn’t even come from one of the children who discovered to their cost that birds have a high fibre diet. It was from a parent who had taken their children to the hospital after noticing a rash. The theory put forward was that it had resulted from contact with a bird.

I amused myself with the idea that the suggestion had been made by the doctor and not the hysterical parent. “Well Mrs Smith we’ve run a series of medical checks on your daughter and I haven’t seen anything like this in all my years of professional experience…now this is a long shot but…your child hasn’t had a barn owl placed on her shoulder in the last 48 hours has she? Really? My god, it’s what I feared”.

The Rocket

The disappointment was palpable. I’d asked the children who they thought our famous visitor to the school might be. “Lady Gaga?” “Jessie J?” “Balloon Man(?)” “Michael Jackson?” (I didn’t have the heart to break the news). Some old bloke in a nappy was not on their hotly anticipated list. The illusion was further dampened by the fact our ‘Gandhi-o-gram’ needed written prompts just to remember his own full name.

I had my first ‘I want my mummy’ moment. I stress one of the children said it, not me. I sometimes forget how young some of them are. The reminders often come in the form of their own naiveté. In what must be a World Record for the quickest ‘Show and Tell’, one child thought it proper to pull from his pocket two shards of glass. No child so much as smirked during a lesson on adjectives when a girl suggested “the juggler has big fat balls!” Nor did anyone question the girl who proudly declared that she has no allergies because she’s a Christian.

We attended a writing course, discovering that adults have a vocabulary of 30,000 to 50, 000 words. Me learn lots. How much of a role model I am elsewhere to the kids is in question after they spied me with a school meal piled high with chips. This was just moments after I’d taught them a lesson on the importance of a balanced diet.

The previous class teacher had attended the writing course and introduced me to her newborn baby. I stared politely at her child, with a permanently fixed grin, for a good 15 minutes. She informed me about infant-related phenomena, including the need to ‘swap breasts’, before the baby puked and she had to go.

I also attended a Child Protection course, although it did not; as I’d hoped teach me anything about protecting myself from kids. This would have been mighty handy as I separated two wildly fighting children on what was supposed to be ‘World Peace Day’.

The governors were up next for a get together. Despite not knowing any of their names, I was firmly advised not refer to any of them as ‘Guv’. They were a cordial bunch though, as were the parents who arrived later and to whom I had to deliver a presentation.

All was going well, until I tried to ad-lib. On the subject of educational visits I was recommending all the usual places, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum “and” I continued “we’ve been learning about Mary Seacole who is buried close to our school so you might want to visit her grave this weekend…” This was followed by an interruption by the secretary. “I have a list of your allergies” she breathlessly said, passing me a piece of paper. They were the children’s allergies, not my own, but I could feel the parents beginning to formulate thoughts on just who was teaching their children.

The week ended with my first year-group assembly. The chasm between the gift and talented and lower ability children was clear from the certificates being handed out. “Well done to child A for discovering this week in Science that particles can travel faster than light and to child B for not eating the Play-Doh”.

A Year 6 child was given a certificate for ‘entertaining old age pensioners’ as part of World Peace Day. Despite no formal training, he had played a piano that was there and sang to them. The teacher present, described it to me as the single, funniest thing he had ever seen. The residents had unanimously disagreed.

Breathe

“You’ll be on your knees by half term” a teacher told me today. I’m not sure if she meant exhausted or begging to keep my job. I seem to be in constant motion, if I wore regulation male teacher clothing I’d resemble a beige blur. I’ve developed a kind of speed walk, not fast enough so I could be accused of running in the corridor and setting a bad example, but a kind of lolloping quick step powered by my long, rangy legs. I’m beginning to suspect the teacher in the opposing classroom thinks I have a daily case of the runs.

An elderly woman on the tube, spotting my bag of books to be marked, smiled and said “aaawww”. I’m not sure of the exact reason, sympathy? empathy? psychopathy? you can never be sure in London. Equally as unpredictable are the children. One child I had earmarked as gifted and talented told me how he’d coloured a tooth black to “trick the tooth fairy”. Another, previously wholesome type turned up one morning looking as if she’d embraced Satanism. “I cut my own fringe!” she beamed. “Yes you did” was all I could manage back.

All things considered the rapport between me and the class is good. Picking them up at the beginning of the day, I was suddenly locked out as the door slammed shut behind me. Without a security pass to let me in and with the teacher now too far down the corridor I was stuck. Her passing class mistook my desperate attempts at asking them to let me in, as some kind of loon out by the new guy.

“Oh well” I said, turning back to my class “we’re locked out of school, you can all go home”. The teacher’s pet interrupted the cheers “No, we can all just go the long way round!” She later told the class she refuses to eat breakfast because she fears attack by a monster (the Honey Monster maybe?). She wasn’t met with much sympathy.

I’m also not afraid to be occasional ‘bad cop’. I told off twins for fighting in the playground. It had started over a disagreement over which one of them was older by two minutes. I also had to ‘deliver the rocket’ to the class over the lack of consideration to class furniture. I didn’t mention it’s because one knock against our asbestos lined walls could result in thirty little toxic avengers.

My rocket ended with my informing them they were missing the first five minutes of their break time; although this was told to them five minutes before they were due to go. It’s handy having a class that can’t tell the time.

To celebrate World Peace Day next week we have a Ghandi impersonator visiting the school, or a ‘Ghandi-o-gram’ as I prefer to call him. Let’s hope he doesn’t get his gigs mixed up and starts stripping off his loin cloth.